KoSync: Upload e-books directly to your Kobo e-reader (BETA)

[gshzn]

Hi all,

Today I am releasing the first version of KoSync, which allows you to upload e-books directly to your Kobo device - without a cable. I built this application to solve a personal itch: going on holiday without having decided which books I want to read, and not bringing a laptop to load books via a USB cable. It was inspired by Calibre-Web.

Features

• Upload books to your personal environment at https://kosync.app
• Get new e-books on your Kobo e-reader wherever you can connect to the internet.

Coming soon:

• Transform epubs into kepubs when synchronising
• Synchronise reading progress
• Download annotations from your e-reader
• User-friendly installer

How does it work?

1. Sign up at https://kosync.app using your Google account
2. Download the KoboRoot.tgz update file with the KoSync client and place it in the `.kobo/` directory on your Kobo device.
3. Upload e-books through the web interface.
4. After your Kobo device finishes installing the KoSync client, hit Synchronise in the KoSync menu on your Kobo device.
5. Watch your ebook appear in the library on your Kobo device!

And.. under the hood?

The project consists of three parts:

• the API server,
• the web application through which one can upload their e-books, and
• the lightweight client running on the Kobo device which downloads ebooks from the API server
• Special thanks to https://github.com/pgaskin and https://github.com/shermp for their NickelMenu and NickelDBus libraries - without them this would not be possible.
  

[Quoth]

It's downloading ebooks to a kobo that you have put on someone else's random server instance on the internet, hosted by a random company. You can actually download from a website to a Kobo, without installing a 3rd party tool on your Kobo.

And uses a Google Account, one of the top invasive companies on the Internet.

Kobo owners be aware.

This is nothing like Calibre Web, which used your own Calibre installation.

At a minimum this ought to be implemented without a Google account and without modification to you Kobo software.

[rantanplan]

So it’s free for now but what are your future plans on pricing? Running my raspberry pi 4 and Calibre-web with a cloudflare tunnel costs me almost nothing, so before I try something like this I don’t want to end in a situation where the service costs like 10€ per month.

[Tommalka]

I like the idea, but the implementation via a third-party website and undocumented code feels odd and requires a lot of trust.

I have been using Kobofileserver for years, which works on the same principle but runs completely locally: https://github.com/tylpk1216/kobofileserver

[rantanplan]

The sync features are interesting. Especially the annotation sync, if it’s synced to the devices and not just to a server.

I’m curious, but everything that would make it worthwhile hasn’t been implemented yet.

[JSWolf]

make a program that works with calibre's OPDS server and then you can do it local or remotely and you'll be sure it's safe.

[Dirk-71]

Uploading my ebooks to your server? Never ever. This has no future.

[JSWolf]

What I'm wondering is if this is just a ploy to get free eBooks.

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I'm wondering is if this is just a ploy to get free eBooks.

That would be more work that just going to the zlibrary.

[gshzn]

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts. I can imagine people are wary or sharing their bought eBooks with a third party. First, I want to share that this project is fully open-source (and will remain that way) with the source code located at https://github.com/gshzn/kosync. It can relatively easily be self-hosted - I will make this process easier by providing Docker containers.

Second, I decided to use Google for logging in as it reliefs the application of the burden of securely storing anyone’s passwords - I didn’t want to focus on this in the early stages of the project.

Originally Posted by rantanplan

The sync features are interesting. Especially the annotation sync, if it’s synced to the devices and not just to a server.

I’m curious, but everything that would make it worthwhile hasn’t been implemented yet.

You mention syncing annotations to devices. Are you talking about extracting the annotations and syncing it to the same Kobo device? Or where would you like the annotations to end up?

[gshzn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

make a program that works with calibre's OPDS server and then you can do it local or remotely and you'll be sure it's safe.

That’s an interesting idea, I wasn’t aware Calibre had the OPDS server. I can definitely create a small tool to read epubs from this Calibre endpoint and synchronise them to a Kobo device. I’ll make sure to add that to the list of other projects I can make or somehow implement this in KoSync itself. Thanks for the tip!

[gshzn]

Originally Posted by Dirk-71

Uploading my ebooks to your server? Never ever. This has no future.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to read through and sharing your thoughts. I understand your concerns around uploading ebooks to my server. I can see why you’d be wary of that. An alternative I will improve is providing self-hosted options using Docker containers, as I mention earlier. Aside from that, investigating encrypted storage on the server is also on the list to improve upon.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by gshzn

That’s an interesting idea, I wasn’t aware Calibre had the OPDS server. I can definitely create a small tool to read epubs from this Calibre endpoint and synchronise them to a Kobo device. I’ll make sure to add that to the list of other projects I can make or somehow implement this in KoSync itself. Thanks for the tip!

That is brilliant. Thank you.

[Dirk-71]

Syncing from Calibre Web could be an option. I use Calibre Web on my Synology NAS...this is self hosted and safe.

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by gshzn

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts. I can imagine people are wary or sharing their bought eBooks with a third party. First, I want to share that this project is fully open-source (and will remain that way) with the source code located at https://github.com/gshzn/kosync. It can relatively easily be self-hosted - I will make this process easier by providing Docker containers.

Second, I decided to use Google for logging in as it reliefs the application of the burden of securely storing anyone’s passwords - I didn’t want to focus on this in the early stages of the project.



You mention syncing annotations to devices. Are you talking about extracting the annotations and syncing it to the same Kobo device? Or where would you like the annotations to end up?

Multi device support für annotations.